međuslavenska zajednica

15. medial, passive, conditional, aspect of verbs

active voice

All verbslistedhere in previous lessons weretheactive voice. The active voice meansthat some subjectin the nominative is the performer (= initiator) ofaction represented by a verb. An object (= target) of action is in accusative.

This verbal voice means, that the object is identical with the subject. Neoslavonic has a reflexive personal pronoun se, sebe, sebie, ... which exactly refers the subject. This pronoun has been already introduced in the lesson 7. - pronouns. Note thatthispronoun does not havenominative case and its other cases arevery similar to personal pronouns Iand you. (e.g. mne = tebe = sebe, mnie = tebie = sebie, ...)

This means, that the medial voice can be regarded as the special kind of the active voice, where the subject and the object are identical. These verbs are written with the pronoun se in dictionaries (e.g. kupati se = to take a bath).

The passive voice is a verbal mode, where the subject in the nominative is not a performer, but a target. This means thatit isquite the oppositethan in the active voice. This voiceis usedwhena target informationisaboutfar more important than performer information. The performer, which is lessimportantmay(butneed not)be expressed usingthe instrumental.

The passivevoiceis formedin the exactly same way as in English: Using a combination ofthe verbbyti (to be) andthe passiveparticiple inthe nominative. The passive participle behaves as an adjective and is made in a very similar way as the L-participle from the infinitive via modification of the infinitive ending as follows:

Short verbs ending by -iti have the passive participle -ity, -ita, -ite, -iti.

The conditional refers to a hypothetical state of affairs, or an uncertain event, that is contingent on another set of circumstances. The only verb having its own conditional is byti = to be.

byh

I would

byhom

we would

bys

you would

byste

you would

by

he,she,it would

byhu, by

they would

The conditional of all verbs is made by the combination of the L-participle and the conditional of byti (to be).

examples:

Dielal bych. = I would like to do.Dielal li bys? = Would You like to do?Pili byhom. = We would like to drink.Slyšela bys. = You (f.) would like to hear.Jadli by. = They would like to eat.

aspect of verbs

The aspect defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker. Neoslavonic has two possible aspects:

The unitary view without internal temporal flow is known as the perfective aspect, and

the non-bounded view with reference to temporal flow is known as the imperfective aspect.

The perfective aspect allows the speaker to describe the action related to some concrete event as
finished, completed or launched, started in the natural way. The imperfective
aspect does not present the action as related to some exact time event, but rather as pending or
ongoing.

Unfortunately, spoken Slaviclanguages​​are very different in verbal aspect. It is possible that the same verb is perfective in one language and imperfective in another language. Moreover, west and east Slavic languages (in contrast with southern languages) use the present tense in perfective mode as asubstitute for the future tense (e.g. napisati (to write pf.), napišu = I will write down). It is important to know this phenomenon while talking to native Slavic speakers.

In Neoslavonic, we have only a few of simple rules, which are almost common and comprehensible to various Slavic speakers:

All verbs having infinitive -vati and present tense -vaju, -vaješ, -vaje, -vajeme, -vajete, -vajut (regardless they have or do not have a prefix) are imperfective.